Splash Biography

Kids don’t know how to talk these days, right? For example, ever had someone tell you that you can’t say “they” to mean a single person? Probably. But did you know that even Shakespeare used “they” this way? He wrote: “one knocks! Hark, how they knock!” in Romeo and Juliet over 400 years ago, so why do we have rules like this, if great writers (including Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, and more) don’t follow them? Who decides what’s “right” in a language? Should there even be rules? In this class, we will talk about how languages really work, using historical examples of language change, formal linguistics, and modern-day examples of dialects and language use to get to the root of why differing opinions about language exist.